Hey! I have recently been introduced to the CKD diet and think it may work for me for fat burning purposes. I train hard (4 days of weight training, 4-5 days of HIIT cardio a week) and have had the worst luck over the past 3 months with losing body fat while eating a well balanced "clean" diet!! I'm currently 20% and my goal is 10-12%

Today is Day9 of a keto diet and I planned to have a loading day within a couple of days. I keep my net carbs under 30g and my calories have ranged from 1500-1700 a day. I don't feel much different at all so I decided to test my urine for ketones.....it was negative!

Is this normal?! Should I continue to test my urine until it's positive before I have a carb loading phase?

Hi, I haven't heard many success stories of folks with the CKD, but will confess to not following it closely. When Lyle Mcdonald tried it years ago, it did not go well for him either. Have there been many success stories?

I've been experimenting with a TKD, and post workout (twice a week) I take 2 rolls of smarties (15g of glucose) with whey protein. However, I have not been following that protocol long enough to have many data. One thing I can say is that sometimes it takes me awhile to get back into ketosis, even without too large a digression from extremely low carb intake (unsweetened iced tea is the major carb contributor for me).

For doing a CKD, I would think a prerequisite would be being in ketosis :-) Some folks have to restrict protein as well. How much protein are you consuming?

When i really started lifting weights i played with CKD for about a month or so.
I was able to jump in and out of ketosis pretty quickly but the hard part was the tracking and making sure how to do the carb up. It just got to be too much for me so i quit doing that.
I would do my depletion workout on Saturday morning and spend saturday eating carbs. The hard part is to really make it work right you have to eat carbs but keep your fat really low and keep the protein moderate. So its not like you can really carb out on cake and ice cream and pizza and burgers and donuts and stuff. I was eating fat free carby stuff which wasnt really all that great. I would jump right into starting my day with coconut oil on Sunday morning and going to basically no carbs, high fat and high protein. I would be in ketosis by tuesday or wednesday morning.
My carbs were a lot of fat free and low fat ice cream, yogurt, cereal, things like that. The lower you keep the fat the less likely you are to store those fat on your carb up day. It did work. I gained muscle like crazy but i just couldnt keep it up. It made a difference having that depletion workout that morning.

I cant answer why you arent in ketosis. If your carbs are that low and you are eating enough fat and keeping protein moderate you should be. You might be eating too much protein.

Id look into just doing induction/staying in ketosis. Have a glycogen pre/during cadio drink and then maybe protein whey isolate post workout. For muscle building you need the protein after for repair/growth. If you doing real hiit ive seen pre/during drink to keep your muscles fed so you dont start to deplete muscle. Most times you will burn it off and only be out of ketosis for a few hours, so you can keep your primary fuel source as fat.

This is what I've seen most of. I lift heavy 4-5 times per week and do 30+ minutes of random hills on the bike at 20+mph. I only do the post protein isolate for now, 0 carbs.

And I've only been positive on strips like twice. If you drink plenty of water you may never turn then purple. Go by metallic mouth taste if possible or get an expensive meter.